


The Call

by inigosflowers (hyliaslight)



Category: Fire Emblem Heroes
Genre: Original Character as Summoner, Self-Insert, rating may change because i have an incurable potty mouth, will likely tag more individual characters as they become more prominent, yes i'm a shameless self insert what of it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2020-11-28 20:33:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20972636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyliaslight/pseuds/inigosflowers
Summary: Open your heart—I am calling youRight from the very start, your wounded heart was calling tooIt's not easy being the Summoner of the Order of Heroes. But the choice was made, and there's no turning back.





	1. A Strange Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Big time inspired by _The Call_ by Celtic Woman, which gives me Feelings of all kinds for basically every FE game I've played, but it's especially fitting for Heroes because, well, the whole concept of summoning :)

To be completely honest, I went along with it because I thought it was a dream. I mean, my last clear memory was of laying in my bed watching something mindless on Netflix, and then there was a vaguish memory of someone calling my name, and suddenly I was outside, in front of a standing stone with a weird tree carved into it and a perfectly round hole in the middle.Beyond the stone there was a sweeping view of forested mountains in the distance, low on the horizon in a way that made me realize that I probably very high up, and the stone itself was at the edge of a strange circle of ground comprised of intricately carved stone pathways and pools of water of indeterminate depth.

I was also wearing some very fantasy RPG style clothing.

“Ooh! You’re here!” came a voice from behind me. I spun around to face the speaker, a red-haired woman, also wearing some very fantasy RPG style clothing, and carrying the fanciest axe I had ever seen. Not that I saw many axes in real life, but it was fancy even for a fantasy RPG axe, I thought. The woman, who looked kind of familiar for some reason, continued to speak. “Then the ritual actually worked?”

“Uh,” I said, because that definitely seemed like a question, and I definitely didn’t know the answer to it.

“Hold on,” the woman frowned. “Are you really our Summoner? The Great Hero? You don’t really look like the thee-and-thou type.”

“I’m—uh,” I said. “Uh, no. No thees and thous here.”

The woman continued to inspect me skeptically, which was just, incredibly uncomfortable. “Sorry, where am I, exactly?” I asked, trying to divert her attention to something that was actually important.

“Oh, right,” she blinked. “You’re in—oh, drat.” She was looking over my shoulder as she said that. It was not a comforting sentiment. “How did they catch up to us already?”

I would’ve asked who, exactly, she meant, but barely got the chance to open my mouth before another voice shouted out: “FOUND YOU!”

I spun around and saw another axe, much less fancy than the woman’s, which was swinging directly at me. I let out a shriek as I was knocked to the side by the woman, who then proceeded to use her own axe against the enemy. _My subconscious is really going hard on that fantasy RPG theme, huh_, I thought. That would’ve made for a perfect tutorial battle, after all. I could almost hear the redhead leveling up.

“Whew, okay, now that that’s taken care of,” she said, once the enemy had been soundly defeated. “My name’s Anna. I’m the commander of the Order of Heroes.”

“Um.” This time it was my turn to blink as she turned to me with an expectant look. “My name’s Kenzie…?”

“Nice to meet you, Kenzie,” Anna said briskly. “Oh, right, you asked where you are. Well, this is a Gateway, one of several within the Kingdom of Askr. That soldier was from the Emblian Empire, which is planning to invade Askr.”

“Oh,” I said dumbly.

“I was desperate for help, so I performed a special summoning ceremony. And here you are!” she grinned. “Lucky us!”

“Lucky,” I echoed.

“Well, there’s no time to rest. We have to act fast if we’re going to save our kingdom!”

“Uh huh.”

“So this is all yours now.” She pulled out an object that looked kind of like some fancy contraption you would put a wii mote in. Or a weird gun. “I’m not sure how it works, but you should—“

“What _is_ it?” I was getting a little irritated about how she seemed to assume I knew what she was talking about, and also that my subconscious wasn’t filling in the blanks. Way to make me feel like an idiot even in my dreams, subconscious. Way to go.

“The divine Breidablik,” she answered, looking at me like I was crazy. “I used it in a summoning ceremony, which brought you here, because apparently you are the one person who can use it.”

“Oh, okay.” Well, at least that meant I got to play some kind of hero in this dream. Anna narrowed her eyes at me, before appearing to decide to let her concerns go for the time being. Which was probably a good thing, because right then more generic enemies showed up, yelling just like their buddy from earlier.

“Here,” she said, shoving Breeda- Bread- what was the thing called again? She shoved the magic gun into my hands. “Take Breidablik and get out of here, I’ll hold them off!”

“Wait—“

“You’re not equipped to help me, and that relic is important!” Anna insisted.

“But—!“

Breidablik lit up in my hands, shooting out a beam of bright white light. When the light faded, there was another person standing with us.

Holy shit, was that Virion?

Was I dreaming about _Fire Emblem_?

That was a new one.

“How did you do that?!” Anna asked, after Virion had declared himself glad to be of service.

“…it just happened?” I said.

“You accidentally summoned a Hero?” she spluttered. I pondered over the obvious capitalization of Hero that I heard in her tone of voice. “You just picked up the relic and you used it by accident?”

“Might I suggest tabling this discussion for after the battle?” Virion suggested. Which was a very good idea, since the generic token bad guys were getting closer. Between the two of them, however, the problem was quickly dealt with, and then Anna was back to focusing on me, suddenly decidedly cheerful about my somehow shooting Virion out of Breidablik completely by accident.

“Ha! I never doubted you for a second!” she said. “You’re the one who will save our kingdom. Our order is small, but welcome to our ranks. Please, help us find more Heroes to assist us.”

She looked at me expectantly. I looked back at her, then at Virion, and then at Breidablik the divine fantasy gun.

“Sure,” I shrugged.

Because I still thought it was a dream.


	2. A Strange Reality

By the time I realized it wasn’t a dream, it was too late.

People were _counting_ on me. There were real, actual lives on my hands. Lives of people who I had once known as video game characters, sure, but here they were real and alive and holy shit I wasn’t just a Summoner I was the tactician, why would they make me the tactician? Somehow I’d managed not to get anyone killed so far, but this kind of thing was way out of my league.

Perhaps that should’ve been a reason for me to insist on leaving. Back in my own world I could barely be responsible for taking care of myself in the face of college stress, let alone take on the responsibility of keeping an army alive while fighting an actual war. (It helped that there was magic in this world and that the people here generally seemed more sturdy than I would ever expect from a human body, but still.) However, despite its allure, the idea of demanding to be sent home held several problems.

For one thing, I wasn’t sure if there was a way for me to even be sent home. The ritual that summoned me was different from the way I summoned Heroes using Breidablik, so I couldn’t be reliably sure that I could be sent home the same way that Heroes were. Similarly, I couldn’t be sure that another Summoner could be called to take my place once I was gone. As strange as this world was—_video game characters were real people and I specifically could summon them for help and honestly sometimes I still thought I had to be dreaming_—I couldn’t just risk cutting off their best bet for ending the war between Askr and Embla.

Finally, and most personally problematic of all, I had grown attached.

I mean, of course I would get attached. Several of the Heroes that I summoned I had already been attached to as characters in my own world. It might be very different talking to and getting to know them as real people, rather than fictional, but it was still incredibly easy for those attachments to grow into real friendships.

It had maybe hurt a little, the first time I had summoned a Hero I’d felt attached to and had been treated like a stranger. Ever since I came to the conclusion that it was much, much too late to turn back now, I had repeatedly told myself that there was nothing to do but adjust, because to do otherwise meant getting people killed for sure. Part of adjusting meant reminding myself not to expect any familiarity. When I played Fire Emblem games, I had only superficially inhabited a character that in a Hero’s reality was someone they knew and even loved; there was no way that they _could_ know me.

The problem was that my heart still held out just a little hope. I was so far away from anyone that was truly familiar to me…

My greeting and orientation for Leo, the first Hero that I had ever summoned whose power rated him as 5-star on the Order’s special scale, had been a little stilted and awkward because of it. When asked by Sharena and Alfonse, who often liked to be present when I summoned new Heroes, I’d excused it by saying that the summoning had simply drained me. It was true enough, actually—summoning required some sort of power in its own right. Less powerful Heroes required less energy, some so little that I barely even noticed it, but we had learned that more powerful Heroes could take a lot out of me.

In the end, I began to get to know Leo because we both spent a lot of time in the Order’s library. Running into him there had also been a bit awkward at first, solely on my end, because I was embarrassed by my own stupid hopes. However, adjustment was still my mantra, and so that was what I did.

Hesitant small talk that I forced myself to initiate turned into discussions of what books we were reading, which led to debates about academia and political systems. Such debates usually exhausted me at home, where I often felt so helpless, obtuse, or otherwise lacking. In this new world though, with its own history and its relationships with multiple other unique worlds with _their_ own history, they became incredibly interesting and spirited.

Leo may not have been my brother the way he was my avatar’s—_Corrin’s_—but he had become my friend. And I knew that having him as a real friend was so much better than having him as a fictional brother.

After that, it had been even easier to befriend others as they came along, even those whom I had not been familiar with from the games back home. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d felt before getting to know Leo, and now that I had formed that bond, I longed for more.

It was a familiar longing; I had always had trouble making true, close friends back home. I’d always attributed it to a combination of my introverted nature and, pretty depressingly, my own forgettability as a person. Here, though, I was The Summoner. Nobody could forget me if they tried, and nobody would want to, since I was such a key player in the war. Sometimes, when we had downtime, people even approached _me_, rather than the other way around. That was such an unfamiliar feeling that it pretty much guaranteed I would do anything for those people.

So yeah. I was very, very, very much attached.

When you cared about people, though, the last thing you wanted to do was put them in harm’s way. That was exactly what I did by summoning them in the first place, and then more directly by sending them out into battle, where they did as their tactician told them to. The responsibility began to weigh on me more than ever before, but unlike before my life had undergone such a drastic change, I couldn’t afford to spiral and break down. Nor could anyone else afford for me to do so.

They all believed in me, though. Well, likely some more than others, but so many of them did still. I couldn’t let them down.

Everything was so complicated, and on top of that, sometimes I could swear I still heard someone calling my name. At first I had been sure that the call I heard way back when I was first summoned was part of the summoning itself, something to do with Breidablik and Anna’s ritual. Instead, the voice continued to call out to me, always softly, as if from a very great distance, and usually in a rare moment of combined quiet, stillness, and near-dissociation. It was so rare, though, that often times I started to doubt that I wasn’t imagining it.

I had thought all of this was a dream at one point. I couldn’t exactly discount the voice calling my name with ease anymore. But, I would tell myself each time, after startling and looking around only to see no one and hear nothing further, that can be a problem for another day. In this new reality, deal with what you can first, before worrying about what you can’t.

That’s what I tried to convince myself, anyway. I was never very good at not worrying about things.

**Author's Note:**

> I have. a very small attention span and am working on like a million fics all at once at all times, so I can't promise when updates will happen, but i've got two more chapters of this prepared already so that's nice.


End file.
